Physiologies of the Modern: Zola, Experimental Medicine, and the Naturalist Stage

Physiologies of the Modern: Zola, Experimental Medicine, and the Naturalist Stage STANTON B. GARN ER, JR. In t953, on the anniversary of the French premiere of Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Allthor, playwright Georges Neveux reflected on the play's impact: Just thirty years ago today, an elevator came down on the stage of the [Theatre des] Champs Elysees and deposited on it six unexpected characters whom Pirandello had conjured up. [...} [Ilt will be impossible to understand anything about today's theaterif one forgets that little flying box out of which it stepped one April evening in 1923. (qtd. in Bishop 49-50) Characterizing Pirandello as "the greatest prestidigitator of the Twentieth Century, the Houdini of interior life," Neveux elaborated on the playwright's theatrical achievement: "In his most important play, Six Characters, he took the very center of the real world and turned it inside out right in front of us, as the fisherman turns inside out the skin of an octopus to lay bare its viscera" (qtd. in Bishop (36). I open with Neveux's tribute because it foregrounds an important intersection in the discourse of modem drama. In his reference to "loday's theater," Neveux employs the language of the modem familiar to the late-nineteenthand early/mid-twentieth-century theatre's discourse about itself. Theatre "today" - and by this Neveux means the theatre of Jean Giraudoux, Almand Salacrou, Jean Anouilh, and himself - achieves its contemporaneity through reference to an earlier moment of disclosure. The newness of this disclosure its modernity - is represented, in part, through the language of bodies and bodily penetration. If the "real" world is a body, then Pirandello's theatre constitutes an operation on that body, crossing its thresholds, turning it inside out, revealing in the organic matter of its entrails "the other side ofourselves" (qtd. in Bishop (36). To the extent that the world of the "real" and of "ourselves" is Modern Drama, 43 (Winter 2000) 529 530 STANTON O. GARNER, JR. something living, then the drama of Pirandello offers itself, before the spectatorial gaze, as a kind of theatrical vivisection. This conjunction of the modem and the corporeal/somatic is central to the emergence of "modem drama" as a discursive category. This article is concerned with the making of this "modem" drama, the genesis and genealogy of its animating terms, and the strategies with which those who deploy the discourse of "modern drama" seek to resolve its inherent instabilities. For while "lfIWefn" is (as IIeiiri Lefebvre notes) "a prestigious word, a talisman, an open sesame" (185), its cultural currency also occasions an anxiety of reference , an awareness that, like the present moment itself, the modem is a site of vanishings, of self-obsolescence. In what we might call the "manifesto" phase of modern drama.(roughly 1880 to 1940), those who used the term sought to ground and legitimize the "modem" through the language of the body - both the theatrical body (described in the languages of radical actuality) and the body as it was simultaneously being constructed within medical discourse. This connection between the corporeal fields of theatre and medicine should not surprise us. Peopled as it regularly is by doctors, nurses, and medical students, the drama of this period shows a recurrent interest in the institution and practice of medicine. The presence of such figures as Pirandello's it dottore signals a deeper preoccupation with the body and the embodied mind as medical subjects. Given that the body underwent discursive and theoretical transformations within medical science during the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth, it served as a useful, even inevitable, referent for a theatre that was undergoing its own interrogation of the body as a site for observation. To the extent that the nineteenth century witnessed a deepening of the relationship between medicine and the physical sciences, the cultural authority of medical discourse provided the modern theatre with a language through which its modernity could be "bodied " forth. An awareness of the connections between theatre and medicine, in other words, situates the earliest formulations of modem drama within a wider discursive field concerned with the body, its languages of...